His House

Chapter 28

We walked back down the hall in which we had come from in continued silence, the previous horrendous images still stuck primarily in our minds.

I looked past Logan's blue tufts of hair and at Ace who looked like he had a little pep in his step. It was like he didn't just kill a child with a baseball bat.

The way he was walking and holding himself was like a punch to all of our faces.

We then came to a door on the right. It was a tall, windowless, white door where Ace had to take a key out of his pocket to open. The door unlocked with a click and Ace opened it, gesturing with his free hand for us to enter first. We all passed him and his crooked grin, keeping our eyes down and away from him.

As we came to a halt on the other side, I couldn't help but to raise one of my brows. The bright, white room was completely bare, the only thing was that there was a single door on the other side of the room that resembled the one that we had just walked through. Curiosity for what lay on the other side made me momentarily forget what happened less than five minutes ago.

Ace closed the door behind himself and walked around all of us. He then stopped a couple meters away and smiled at each of our confused expressions before speaking up through the settled silence.

"Like I had said earlier," he said, the smile never faltering, "five of you will be dead by the end of the morning." He took a pause and studied each of our faces before continuing. "The other five on the other hand will be moving on."

I glanced at Willow and then looked at everyone else in the room. What did he mean by 'moving on'? Move on to where?

Ace crossed his arms over his chest, his smile slowly slipping from his face. "We have been really rushed this time around. So, I apologize for the strain that must have been put on all of your bodies." He reached up with one of his hands and rubbed the back of his neck. "Normally this whole procedure would have taken anywhere from one to two weeks, but this time, we only had a couple days before we'd have to send you off."

Send us where?

"Well, now," Ace dropped his arms and reached into one of his pockets to retrieve the notepad that he had spent so much time looking into the past few days. "I will be going over the results."

"What do you mean by results?" Lily blurted out.

The smile returned to Ace's face. "What do you think the purpose of the last few days has been? Yesterday we made you guys go through those three tests to determine who was 'better'." Ace saw our continued confused expressions and explained what he had meant, "Austin, Marcus, and I -because of how crunched the time limit was- created a point system. So last night, I spent most of the night with Marcus calculating everyone's scores." Ace held up his notepad so everyone could see better. "In here are the results. I only need five of you. So the top five will be moving on while the other five will be disposed of."

Murmurs went around the room as everyone looked at each other, their eyes wide, just like mine. There was a fifty percent chance that I was going to be dead before afternoon even hit.

Logan raised his hand.

Ace acknowledged the gesture. "Yes?"

"How did the point system work?" Logan asked after lowering the hand.

"Well ten points for the questions, one for each question. Then depending on who got out of the rooms first, would get a few points. And then finally, each of those ten physical activities you got a point for each one that you completed."

I stared down at the white marble floor as I thought of how many points I might have gotten. My group for the escape room got out first so I assume we were going to be somewhere in the top... but were we good enough to be in the top five? I then thought back to those weird scenarios, especially the one where we had to make the decision to try and save our friend or leave them. How many had I gotten right? Have I gotten any right?

"Alright," Ace said, breaking me from my worried thoughts. "I will go over the results right now."